Wednesday, 19 January 2011

We love lid-potatoes

Buddy has been off school all week with a terrible cold, earache and upset tummy. He's barely eaten for days - most unlike him - so today, to help him find his appetite again, we made one of his favourite meals: jacket potatoes.

He didn't really fancy eating anything to be honest; he certainly couldn't make a decision about the filling for his potato. It was then that I remembered good old Milly Molly Mandy. We often refer to our storybooks for inspiration about all kinds of play, craft and cooking, and the classics have a certain cosy appeal extremely suitable for poorly boys and girls. Jane Brocket writes brilliantly about this in one of my favourite books in the world ever, Ripping Things To Do.

So we read Chapter 6: Milly Molly Mandy Enjoys a Visit where she and little-friend-Susan eat yummy lid-potatoes. Buddy was immediately tempted to eat (and help make) a lid-potato, just like in the story.

As Joyce Lankester Brisley writes, 'First Mother took two well-baked potatoes out of the oven. Then she nearly cut the tops off them - but not quite. Then she scooped all the potato out of the skins and mashed it up with a little salt and a little pepper and a lot of butter. And then she pushed it back into the two potato-skins, and shut the tops like little lids.

Then Milly Molly Mandy and little-friend-Susan were given a mug of milk and a plate of bread-and-butter, and one of the nice warm lid-potatoes. And they opened the potato-lids and ate out of them with little spoons.

1 comment:

Thank you for posting this! We just read about lid-potatoes in Milly-Molly-Mandy and I searched for lid-potatoes to show my son and yours was the only picture I could find! What fun to read about your family eating them as a result of reading this book, too!

About Me

Julia, a former school teacher and theatre-in-education performer, is a freelance museum educator and creator of Adventures at Home. Previously an education officer for the BBC and the London Transport Museum with a postgraduate degree in Museum Studies, Julia now teaches hundreds of school children at the British Museum and the Geffrye Museum. It is here that she also devises and leads sessions of stories and song, dance, play and craft for preschoolers. She lives in London with her husband and has two young children of her own.
Adventures at Home is about her family's creative life - they play, sing, dance, cook, build, make and bake whenever they can.
It's a place to exchange ideas, for anyone passionate about nurturing and celebrating play and creativity.